Goliath

Terrorism. Acts of Oppression. The threat of nuclear war. What if one madman aboard a vessel could end these fears forever?

Commander Rochelle "Rocky" Jackson is aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan when the "unsinkable" naval vessel and its entire fleet are attacked from the depths and sunk by The Goliath: A nuclear submarine Rocky helped design almost a decade ago, a top secret DoD project cancelled when the schematics were destroyed by her former fiancé and U.S. Army Ranger, Gunnar Wolfe. Powered by its five jet-pump propulsors and hydrodynamically shaped to be virtually undetectable under water, the sub has one more feature that separates it from all other vessels on the open seas: SORCERESS-its biochemical computer brain.

Rocky eventually learns that the Goliath's plans were not destroyed but secretly sold to the Chinese. Having constructed the $8 billion dollar warship, the Chinese become victims themselves when the sub is hijacked by the project director, Simon Bela Covah, a computer genius and a man with a sad past who once served under Rocky's command at the Navy's Undersea Warfare Center. The attack on the carrier fleet indicates that Covah is hunting down warships in an attempt to arm himself with nuclear weapons.

Simon Covah and his crew share a common bond: They are all victims of violence and oppression. Covah, a Russian, witnessed his Chechan wife and daughters brutally murdered at the hands of his own people as he was tortured. Now the computer genius has one mission: to rid the world of oppressive governments while forcing humanity to disarm. To accomplish this, he plans on giving the world a real lesson in Armageddon. Armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy North America, Covah issues his Declaration of Humanity to the world. If his demands are not met, consequences will be paid. Could the threat of violence forge a lasting peace? But there is another player in this life-and-death chess match. Unbeknownst to the Goliath crew, Sorceress has become self-aware, and is developing its own agenda. You'll have to read the novel to understand how scary a self-aware computer's agenda can be!

I've never read any of Steve Alten's novels. This one has gotten me hooked! It's like an underwater adventure the likes of Jule Verne's 20000 Leagues Under The Sea. I have always entertained the idea of a stealth boat, in this case, it's a stealth submarine along the lines of Seaquest DSV, but totally different.

Also, the idea that a computer becomes self-aware and the process leading it to its descent into madness is most illuminating. The more Sorceress couldn't understand, the more it experimented and slowly it moved to human experimentation, which led to the death of several, if not all of the crew of the Goliath. As a machine, it is devoid of feeling and pain, so there's a certain amount of violence in these pages that are almost gruesome to the point of Hannibal Lecter!

I've always enjoyed the notion that one day, some vigilante will take matters into his own hands and create a crusade to destroy violence in the world. This book highlights the extreme of what someone like that would do. Bomb the hell out of the country to scare them into submitting to disarmament terms, like in this novel, it almost makes you wish that it applied to the current volatile situation in the Middle East.

The love-hate-forgive relationship between Rocky and Gunnar was not exactly the best, but then again, all novels with these plots always seem to be uneasy and cheesy at some point. Also, the need for bigger and bigger ships, submarines and whatever electronic being run by computers begs the question of whether or not they will eventually achieve self-awareness and take on a life of its own.

A highly, highly recommended underwater adventure novel.

8.5 out of 10 stars